Read the passage from Animal Farm . "Boxer!" cried Clover in a terrible voice. "Boxer! Get out! Get out quickly! They're taking you to your death!" All the animals took up the cry of "Get out, Boxer, get out!" But the van was already gathering speed and drawing away from them. It was uncertain whether Boxer had understood what Clover had said. But a moment later his face disappeared from the window and there was the sound of a tremendous drumming of hoofs inside the van. He was trying to kick his way out. The time had been when a few kicks from Boxer's hoofs would have smashed the van to matchwood. But alas! his strength had left him; and in a few moments the sound of drumming hoofs grew fainter and died away. In desperation the animals began appealing to the two horses which drew the van to stop. "Comrades, comrades!" they shouted. "Don't take your own brother to his death!" But the stupid brutes, too ignorant to realise what was happening, merely set back their ears and quickened their pace. Boxer's face did not reappear at the window. Too late, someone thought of racing ahead and shutting the five-barred gate; but in another moment the van was through it and rapidly disappearing down the road. Boxer was never seen again. Which statement best expresses the theme of the passage?
Read the excerpt from "The Story of a Warrior Queen." Then these cruel, wicked men laughed at her [Boadicea]. And because she was a woman and had, they thought, no one to protect her, they beat her with rods and were rude to her daughters. But although the Romans were clever, they sometimes did stupid things. They thought very little of their own women, and they did not understand that many of the women of Britain were as brave and as wise as the men, and quite as difficult to conquer. What qualities of the villain support the universal theme that women are as capable as men? Choose two correct answers.
Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World . In the 1930s, reporters spread out across the American South to capture the voices of history. Some African Americans who had been born as slaves were still alive, and could describe how they had lived sixty years earlier. Through their words we can finally begin to hear about sugar slavery from those who lived it. Ellen Betts, who grew up as a slave on a sugar plantation in Louisiana, recalled that they worked "hour in, hour out, the sugar cane fields sure stretch from one end of the earth to the other." Ceceil George remembered that she "come up in hard times—slavery times." "Every body worked, young, an ole’, if yo’ could carry two or three sugar cane yo’ worked. Sunday, Monday, it all de same . . . it like a heathen part o’ de country." She meant that in other states slaves got Sunday off to worship God. Not in Louisiana: There, sugar was god, and work was the only religion. How do the historical details in this passage support the authors' claim?
Read the excerpt from "A Genetics of Justice” by Julia Alvarez. When the novel came out, I decided to go ahead and risk her anger. I inscribed a copy to both Mami and Papi with a note: "Thank you for having instilled in me through your sufferings a desire for freedom and justice." I mailed the package and—what I seldom do except in those moments when I need all the help I can get—I made the sign of the cross as I exited the post office. Days later, my mother called me up to tell me she had just finished the novel. "You put me back in those days. It was like I was reliving it all," she said sobbing. "I don't care what happens to us! I'm so proud of you for writing this book." I stood in my kitchen in Vermont, stunned, relishing her praise and listening to her cry. It was one of the few times since l had learned to talk that I did not try to answer my mother back. If there is such a thing as genetic justice that courses through the generations and finally manifests itself full-blown in a family moment, there it was. How does the author develop the central idea across these paragraphs?
Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World . On a plantation there were large groups of workers—between fifty and several hundred. The mill was right next to the crop, so that growing and grinding took place in the same spot. And all the work was governed by extremely tight, rigid discipline. The Muslims began to put together the rules for this new kind of farming. Both they and the Christians experimented with using their slaves to run the plantations. At first many of the slaves working sugar plantations in the Mediterranean were Russians, or anyone captured in war. But even all this careful organization did not solve the second problem with sugar. What evidence from the passage best supports the inference that making sugar was difficult? Choose two correct answers.
Read the excerpt from chapter 10 of Animal Farm . But the luxuries of which Snowball had once taught the animals to dream, the stalls with electric light and hot and cold water, and the three-day week, were no longer talked about. Napoleon had denounced such ideas as contrary to the spirit of Animalism. The truest happiness, he said, lay in working hard and living frugally. How does Orwell use irony in this excerpt?
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